Gen was 25 when she became pregnant, and it was her first pregnancy. She was in a committed relationship but not married, and felt a jumble of emotions including fear. Gen knew that she would want children one day, and longed for the "boundless happiness" that she believed would accompany parenthood (Redrappa, 2015). At the same time, Gen was still in graduate school. Her debts were piling up and she and her boyfriend occasionally argued about finances. At first, Gen refrained from telling Rob the news. She was worried that the pregnancy would create conflict in their relationship, and then Gen realized that it was only a matter of time before she had to tell him. She was utterly unwilling to have an abortion, partly because she knew that eventually she did want to be a mother but also because she felt the "spark of life," as she put it, growing in her. Rob had similarly ambivalent feelings, it turned out. He was concerned mostly about finances but also about the tremendous changes the baby would bring to their lives. The pregnancy did strain their relationship, and two years after baby Olive was born, Rob and Gen broke up. As a millennial, Gen did not fear being a single mother as much as people in previous generations. The society might still be patriarchal, but is becoming less so. Women like Gen have been taking back their power, not just as mothers making their own decisions and being financially self-reliant, but also in terms of making the decisions that affect their children. In spite of her midwife and have a home birth. Rob supported this decision, and fully agreed that a home birth would be best for them as well as for the baby. They relished the opportunity to bring the child into the world, not in a clinical environment but in the comfort of its future home.
Unfortunately, not all the stakeholders agreed. Both Rob's and Gen's parents disagreed with the couple's decision to use the home birthing method and urged them to undergo a traditional hospital birth. The conflict between generations and their views on childbirth created significant stress for Rob and Gen. The more Gen read about midwifery, the more she became convinced that home birth was the best option for her. The conflicts between the medical model of childbirth and the traditional midwifery approach highlights the gender issues involved in pregnancy as well as the status differential between men and women in society. As Simmonds, Rothman & Norman (2007) point out, "the history of patriarchy colors our understandings of birth and family," (p. 7). The medical model inherently strips power from the mother; whereas the midwife model empowers her.

Ironically, surrogacy can be a form of empowerment too. As Rudrappa (2015) shows, the decision to…